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Berichten in March 2010

The Shanghai traffic police received 20 brand new Brilliance-BMW 530’s for duty during the Shanghai Expo 2010. That old fashioned little party will start May first and last 6 months. The city counsel is expecting millions of visitors who must be impressed with Shanghai’s riches and that ain’t easy with a Santana. I did expect though that Shanghai would use Shanghai-VW’s (modern ones) or Shanghai-GM’s. I saw some pics of an electricalexpirimental police-Buickthing but that doesn’t really count. Come on SAIC, don’t let those northern cowmen (known as Dongbeiren in Chinese) steal your moment!

The Riich M5 is an interesting looking car and based on the M1 hatchback. But medium-prenium Riich really tried to give it a face of it’s own that fits the new name. ‘M1 sedan’ would have been much more logical but in Cheryworld it is not. That is why we like Cheryworld even though it is sometimes a bit hard to find our way around.

Chery is rapidly expanding the line up of its luxury-middle-class-prenium brand Riich. This is number five; the Riich G3 based on the Chery A5. The biggest change is the front which loox completely new, the rest of the car seems all A5.

Chery copied the Spark for the QQ and Haima copies the QQ for the Prince (Chinese: 王子, Wangzi). Well, that’s only fair. The pictures come straight from the Haima factory on the always sunny island of Hainan. It loox like some dealer-presentation but in these days noting is secret anymore.

Alibaba.com is Asia’s biggest trade website, many small companies try to get their stuff noticed abroad. The Chinese are the funniest with all their copycats and other weird machines. Today we have a fast looking electric tricycle, designated SH8500Z, from a factory called Green Auto Industry from Wucheng in Shandong Province.

The Dongfeng-Fengshen H30, usually simply called ‘Dongfeng H30′, is a rather boring looking machine from Dongfeng Automotive. Dongfeng has joint ventures with Honda, Nissan, Peugeot (PSA) and Kia. The Fengshen-brand is Dongfeng’s first all-by-itself adventure on the passenger car market. To make a boring car a little bit more exciting Dongfeng decided to go for the Cross-treatment.

The L3 is a new ‘prenium’ car from BYD meant to compete not only with Geely and Chery but with the big boys from the joint ventures such as the Volkswagen Lavida. The new machine certainly loox better than all other BYD’s including the F6 which slots theoratically above the L3 is BYD’s line-up.

According to a report on one of China’s largest automotive websites, auto.sina.com, BYD has expressed interest to acquire the Maybach-brand from Mercedes Benz as the Germans will pull the plug in one or two years.

An unmaned BYD official told Sina.com that BYD was very interested in Maybach and would “launch the acquisition” as soon as Benz makes the final decision to quit.

Earlier this month MB and BYD announced a partnership to produce electric vehicles for the Chinese market, so the two are friends already. Still I don’t think Benz will ever consider to sell the Maybach-brand to anyone, let alone to a batterymaker turned carmaker from China.

Hard to say how serious BYD really is, but it is good to see the brand keeps dreaming…

“I see Volvo as a tiger: it belongs to the forest and shouldn’t be contained in the zoo. The heart of the tiger is in Sweden and Belgium,” he said, referring to the two countries where Volvo has its main plants. “Its paws should extend all across the world.”

Said Geely Chairman Mr. Li Shufu, a new Chinese hero who finally got his Volvo. For only 1.8 billion dollars Geely buys one of the most famous automotive brands in the world. Ford on the other hand sold it’s last possibility to compete with Benz and BMW, it won’t work with Lincoln, never.

Some of the latest news on the deal from China Daily: Geely is planning a new Volvo factory in Beijing with an annual capacity of 300.000 cars. Volvo made 330.000 cars in 2009. Chinese ‘experts’ have high hopes on Volvo’s technologies: “Li Shufu has a very strategic target that can be boosted by Volvo’s green technologies.” Volvo is not considered very green in the west but compared with many a Chinese car it is as green as grass.

More importantly, Geely gets all Volvo’s safety knowledge in house which it will use to improve the much critisized safetly of it’s own cars. It is so far unclear what will happen to the Volvo factory in Chongqing, a joint venture with Chang’an Auto that makes the S40 and S80. Earlier rumors said the factory would continue but that is likely only until Geely starts up the new one in Beijing.